What's your resilience capacity?

This week finds me in Boston for the 99th annual conference of the International City/County Management Association, where the executive leaders of the world's cities, counties and other local governments come to connect and to better lead the 50+% percent of the world's population that lives in cities into the future.

As the conference opened, an apropos theme song played: Ain't No Mountain High Enough...to keep us from our goal of a world that works for everyone.  And how aligned that theme is with the resurgent spirit of the city of Boston and Boston Strong, in rising out of the ashes of this year's Boston Marathon bombing.

The people of Boston have demonstrated a characteristic that is increasingly critical for our communities--resilience.  As noted on the website of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities Challenge, building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events, both natural and man made.  No tragedy of mass violence, no natural disaster, no "mountain" of economic devastation can defeat resilient people and resilient communities.  The core characteristics that resilient systems share, both in good times and in challenging times, are:

• Redundancy or use of spare capacity to insure a back-up or alternative when a vital system fails.
• Flexibility--the ability to change, evolve and adapt in the face of disaster.
• Limited or "safe" failure, which prevents failures from migrating or "rippling" across multiple systems.
• Rapid rebound--having the capacity to quickly re-establish functions and provide continuity of operations.
• Constant learning, with feedback loops that anticipate and implement new solutions as conditions change.

What's your resilience capacity?  What can you and your team be doing today and tomorrow to best provide the needed leadership that builds resilience, whether it's about food security, energy use, smart grid technology, floodplain management, or the establishment of partnerships with community organizations for business relocation if needed?  What should we all be doing to honor the spirit of Boston Strong?

Learn more at www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/building-resilient-cities.